Read The Canongate Burns Online
Authors: Robert Burns
I have been reading Chaucer a great deal, the early French poets a great deal, and Burns a great deal. Burns is a beast with splendid gleams, and the medium in which he lived, Scotch peasants, Scotch Presbyterianism, and Scotch drink, is repulsive. Chaucer on the other hand pleases me more and more, and his medium is infinitely superior.
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This epistolary remark, he fleshed out in
The Study of Poetry
:
We English turn naturally, in Burns, to the poems in our own language, because we can read them easily; but in real poems we have not the real Burns.
The real Burns is of course in his Scotch poems. Let us say that much of his poetry, a poetry dealing perpetually with
Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, a Scotchman's estimate is apt to be personal. A Scotchman is used to this world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners; he has a tenderness for it; he meets its poet half way. In this tender mood he reads pieces like the âHoly Fair' or âHalloween'. But this world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners is against a poet and not for him, when it is not a partial countryman who reads him; for in itself it is not a beautiful world, and no one can deny that it is of advantage to a poet to deal with a beautiful world. Burns's world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, is often a harsh, a sordid, a repulsive world; even the world of his âThe Cotter's Saturday Night' is not a beautiful world. No doubt a poet's criticism of life may have such truth or power that it triumphs over its world and delights us.
70
In one respect Arnold simply represents the consequences of the insistent Scottish claims for exclusive possession of Burns. Arnold, with a vengeance, locates him in a brutally circumscribed ethnic world. In another respect, Arnold is quite wildly wrong. He assumes Burns as a naïve realist, almost a poetic pig in clover in a Scottish sty, whereas Burns was a political satirist of the very elements, especially Hebraic spiritual and material hypocrisy, which Arnold himself attacks. Worse, he disconnects Burns, partly linguistically, from the radical
British
fraternity of the 1790s to which he belongs. Burns's accent and examples are Scottish; his themes and insights are comparable to Blake. Despite Edward Dowden's
The French
Revolution and English Literature
(1897) which reintegrates Burns with his English peers, Arnold's authority caused damage so severe that elements of it still exist. It may indeed have influenced the even more authoritative figure of T.S. Eliot, that provincial American who so yearned for Arnoldian metropolitan status, so that he saw in Burns the last flare-up of a subsequently redundant Scottish tradition, rather than a poet who used that tradition to write some of the greatest radical poetry of the late eighteenth century. Given of course, Eliot's monarchical, High Anglican tendencies, it was not in his interest to see in the Scottish literary tradition such virile, dissident flexibility.
71
By the latter part of the nineteenth century and with the embryonic stirring of Modernism, the roots of the later self-defined Scottish Renaissance Movement, a crucial problem for Scottish creative writers was whether Burns could be exhumed as a creative force from under the growing mountains of verbiage, false history
and commercial artefacts. The initial movement in this direction came from R.L. Stevenson with his acutely attuned antennae both to contemporary world literature and to the Scottish tradition. Along with that went a peculiar, even psychic, identification with Robert Fergusson and associated fellow-feeling with Burns. He also grasped the degree to which Burns was indebted to Fergusson. Hence his haunted, near death retrospective of Edinburgh's âthree Robins':
Burns alone has been just to his promise: follow Burns, he knew best, he knew whence he drew fire â from the poor, white-faced, drunken, vicious boy that raved himself to death in the Edinburgh madhouse. Surely there is more to be gleaned about Fergusson, and surely it is high time the task was set about ⦠We are three Robins who have touched the Scots lyre this last century. Well the one is the world's, he did it, he came off, he is for ever: but I and the otherâah! What bonds we haveâborn in the same city: both sickly, both pestered one nearly to madness, one to the madhouse with a damnatory creed ⦠and the old Robin, who was before Burns and the flood, died in his acute, painful youth and left the models of the great things that were to come ⦠you will never know, nor will any man, how deep this feeling is; I believe Fergusson lives in me.
72
Despite the genuine intensity of this feeling, Stevenson felt the task of resurrection of Fergusson and Burns beyond him. The Calvinist and genteel claustrophobia of Edinburgh which he believed had destroyed his namesake was something, with Joycean acumen, from which he fled into ever geographically further exile. Before doing so, however, he diagnosed in his earliest journalistic writings the remarkably over-inflated literary culture that infected Victorian Scotland in general and Burns's false reputation in particular. Rather than Arnold's vision of the Scots retreating north of the Tweed, clutching to their bosoms their shibboleth poet, Stevenson, with much more literary sociological realism, saw the Scots as enormously successful commercial exporters and exploiters of a pseudo-national literary tradition. While the more mature Stevenson would not have adhered to these disparaging remarks about Burns's vernacular poetry, his sense of national literary narcissism did not abate:
It is somewhat too much the fashion to pat Scotch literature on the back. Inhabitants of South Britain are pleased to commend
verses, which, short of a miraculous gift of tongues, it is morally impossible they should comprehend. It may interest these persons to learn that Burns wrote a most difficult and crude patois ⦠there are not so very many people alive in Scotland who could read his works without a furtive reference to the margin ⦠any Englishman need not be ashamed to confess he can make nothing out of the vernacular poems except a raucous gibberish â which is the honest belief of the present reviewer, is about the measure of his achievement. It is partly to this that we must attribute the exaggerated favour of âThe Cotter's Saturday Night', by no means one of his best poems, but one of the most easily understood â¦
But even the least intelligent condescension of the South Briton is better than the hysterical praise with which Mr Grant Wilson bedaubs his native literature ⦠Wilson thinks that Burns spoke âwith too much extravagance' when he called
The
Gentle Shepherd
âthe most glorious poem ever written' ⦠this barbarous gallimaufry or hotch-potch of indiscriminate laudation does not come fairly to the boil, until we hear that Falconer's âShipwreck' placed its author âin the front rank of Scottish poets' ⦠Was there ever such an irreverent hurly-burly of names, such a profane morris-dance of great men and little poetasters? Whaur's Wullie Shakespeare noo?
73
At the end of this assault on the unfortunate James Grant Wilson, we also find this remark on Burns:
A point of curiosity is the rest of Burns's
Ode
about
Washington
, some lines of which appear already in his Correspondence. It is a very poor performance, but interesting as another testimony to the profound sympathy of Burns for all democratic movements. Why does Mr. Wilson tell us no more about the history of the piece.
74
Or, indeed, why did Stevenson, given his brilliantly innovative essay on Walt Whitman in
Familiar Studies of Men and Books
, not himself write about the democratic Burns. Partly perhaps because when talking about Scottish subjects he was infected by a sort of internalized Calvinism so that the empathy he could extend to Villon and Baudelaire (he was preoccupied with both these anarchic French spirits) could not be replicated for Burns who, like Hazlitt, he declared a sexually out-of-bounds bounder.
75
A second wave was to follow Stevenson in the wake of the First
World War. The British imperial economic and political project was damaged beyond repair, as correctly interpreted by the tiny Scottish avant garde, and it was felt that Scotland needed to be reconnected to its roots. Obstacles to this were the travesty of Celticism present in the sentimental tartanisation of the nation. âOut of the Celtic twilight', as MacDiarmid wrote, âand into the Gaelic sun'. Another cultural, political phenomenon as destructive to what the avant garde considered vital to a resurrected Scotland was the Burns phenomenon now incorporated into The Burns Federation. Between the avant garde and the established Burnsians there was no co-operation and, indeed, relations were soon to turn to active hostility. Catherine Carswell's honest, passionate biography of Burns was met with a bullet sent through the post to her. Written from her Lawrentian influenced position of a reintegrative instinctual and erotic vision, such open discussion of the poet's sexual nature was unacceptable. By far the greatest of all Burns's scholars the American John De Lancey Ferguson, as his correspondence with Mrs Carswell shows, was met not with open hostility but a marked lack of co-operation from the Federation regarding his magisterial edition of the poet's letters. His subsequent biography, the fine
The Pride and the Passion
, was met with, as he ruefully put it, âpassionate apathy'. Presbyterian Tory-Unionism would not release its death grip on a poet to whom, unlike Sir Walter Scott, it had absolutely no claim. Edwin Muir, while not personally empathetic to Burns as a poet, concisely summed up what he perceived as an end-game for Burns and Scotland. The occasion for Muir's observations was the unveiling of a new statue to Burns with that bastion of âsocialism', Ramsay McDonald, making the oration:
The symbolism implicit in this scene is quite casual and involuntary. The churchyard could hold only a certain number of people; the âplatform party' (in Scotland one is always hitting against platform parties) was naturally chosen from the more well-to-do admirers of the poet: landlords, baronets, and officers in the British army. Objectively one can see that, Scotland being what it is, a ceremony in honour of its greatest poet should just take this form and no other. But at the same time one is driven to ask what can have happened to Burns since his death to make him now the implicit property of the middle and upper classes, when he was the property of the poor man at the beginning. This change may be briefly described by saying that Holy Willie, after being the poet's butt, has now become the keeper of his memory â¦
Burns set the world in a roar of laughing at the people who now unveil statuary in his honour. Why is it that they are so kind to his kail and potatoes?
One reason for this is that the figure of Burns has become quite vague, and that the vaguer he becomes the more universally he pleases his countrymen. His words no longer mean anything.
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Muir then turns to an exemplary example of this vagueness by dealing with MacDonald's eulogy to Burns. At this time Scottish society was in a state of political unrest, although somewhat different from the 1790s. There existed, however, a similar pattern of economic breakdown, profiteering and war weariness though the revolutionary cloud on the horizon was Russia, not France. Muir quotes MacDonald's maunderings on Burns as revolutionary whereby âBurns's revolution, was a revolution in soul, a revolution in being, a revolution in manliness, a revolution in humanity'. That is, of course, a revolution whereby everything except economic power and social justice are effectively changed. With his customary lucidity, Muir pointed out how the events of the darkening 1930s cast their shadow on the then contemporary interpretations of the 1790s:
I think I have said enough to show that Burns has been ostentatiously but securely swallowed and digested by Holy Willie during the century and a bit since his death. Burns was not the revolutionist who Mr. MacDonald makes him out to be, but he was an honest writer. And though he was a revolutionist, he showed his sympathy with the French Revolution in a quite practical way, without stopping to consider whether it was a mere revolution in circumstance or a revolution in soul. We cannot imagine the Burns whose statue Mr. MacDonald unveiled sending arms even to the constitutional government of Spain against the expressed wishes of the established order, as the living Burns did to the leaders of the French revolution against a similar prohibition. Something has happened to him since his death, and it is what happens to all writers after their death, no matter what they have written. It may not be true that all writers reflect the economic ideology of the society in which they liveâI do not think it isâbut it does seem to be true that their writings are finally and in the long run made to reflect that ideology, by a process of elimination and transformation, until the most influential classes in society can finally put their seal
on the result. This necessity for social elimination and transformation probably accounts for Mr. MacDonald's sharply condemnatory but vague references to Burns's recent biographers (he could only have meant Mrs. Catherine Carswell's plain-spoken and entirely sympathetic
Life
). For an honest biography helps to destroy the imposed image and to undo careful work of social transformation.
77
Muir, of course, was not to know that in 1993, Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, toasted the âImmortal Memory' in the Edinburgh Central constituency (we are reliably informed by a still enraged Old Labour source) without mentioning Burns at all.
One would have anticipated that Hugh MacDiarmid, bourgeois Scotland's worst nightmare, with his celebration of John Maclean, Lenin and his intended book on Red Clydeside would have been prolix on the parallels between the 1790s and 1930s. With his early involvement in the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.), he was, overtly and expansively, a far more politically committed writer than Muir. Even so, he rarely mentions Scottish culture's constant, mendacious denial of Burns as a democratic revolutionary. He was, however, constantly caustic about the literary implications of the Burns cult and how it had diverted attention not only from Burns's poetry but poetry
per se
into a morass of biographical, antiquarian trivia. As he wrote: